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The cool pose on the clammy summer night, it melts into "le lac sur les pierres" of the Rimbaud Inferno. (A trunkload of poems and paintings is dumped into it in an introductory gag.) The pug-protagonist (Denis Lavant) is newly single and miserable, everybody's story, in his Caligari apartment he keeps a scrawled timeline of key events ("first shoplifting," "first attempted murder"). He wanders in a daze scored to Bowie's "When I Live My Dream," kissing couples to him are mere street performers while elsewhere the jilted gamine (Mireille Perrier) dances by herself, a sublime interlude. "The problem with loners is that they're never alone." Childlike artifice (stars painted on a wall, like an infant's room) and raw feeling for Leos Carax's first swoon, blackouts and superimpositions in an aching interplay of solitude and connection. His Antoine Doniel leaps over turnstiles and fumbles shoplifting, at a soiree he declares himself an oceanographer and mingles with the frozen swells. The hostess recounts a telepathic bond out of Borzage, and sure enough amid the guests is a survivor from the silent era ("I pushed the first dollies," he pantomimes) contemplating the tongue-tied new generation. Heartbreak as one endless nocturnal meander—youngsters feeling old, pinball machines revealing their blinking innards, the voice in the intercom and the moonstruck astronaut. Suddenly, the oasis of a kitchen encounter anchored by Auden's cracked teacup. (In doleful-incandescent close-ups, Perrier is magically transfigured into Anna Karina and Jean Seberg and Falconetti.) Vigo redivivus, a perfect expression of the romantic mind, morbid and rapturous. "First came words. No, emotions!" Cinematography by Jean-Yves Escoffier. With Carroll Brooks, Maïté Nahyr, and Christian Cloarec. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |